I am beginning seriously the study of Latin and in order to do that I am using the texts of the European Renacentist Grammarians (and other resources but of the XIXth century) and I found the great Colloquia Familiaria on the web. Probably, you already know they by means of Stoa.com (http://www.stoa.org/colloquia/) but I found another link to the ErasmusÂ´ didactic dialogues.
http://www.grexlat.com/biblio/colloquia/index.html

I myself enjoy reading -besides Classical (specially, I love Epic, Bucolic, &c.), and some Medieval stuff- those works produced by European humanists of the XVI-XVII centuries, concretely those works related to Neostoicism. I don't like sometimes the bad use of Latin made onwards from these centuries. Well, I'll give you some names, links, &c., and let me know your objections, or other things which youÂ´d wish to deal about.
(And, well, if you say "renaissance texts" I can also answer you by means of Iohannes Boccaccio, Petrarca and Dante. I must confess that I feel, specially Francesco Petrarca, more in favor to the Italian language (fiorentino) in his Latin writings than in favor of a mere and pure Latin.)

As for Colloquia, I like them as a pÃ¦dagogical tool. I'm not very old (I'm seventeen years old) but if I had children, I would use these Colloquia (and other ones, and Orberg's Lingua Latina, of course) in order to make them fluent in Latin, &c.

Transcribing books is of course much more time-consuming than scanning them, so Project Gutenberg will always be behind Google Books, but the good news is, they have to pay some attention to what they're doing! They have a few works by Erasmus here. Of course, their selection of Latin works is small, but the file sizes are much smaller than scanned PDFs, too. Unfortunately, most of them are in plain .txt format. (Their theory is that proprietary formats like PDF come and go, but that people will still be able to read plain ASCII centuries from now.) You can always convert them, or download them from manybooks.net instead. They have almost all of PG's catalog, and you can download them in a variety of formats.

thesaurus wrote:I've also taken an interest in the Colloquia, and I've copied and pasted all of the Stoa's text into one document file. If anyone wanted a copy of it to use offline or something let me know.

Gonzalo, what other renaissance texts have you found useful? I like the natural approach to Latin that Erasmus takes.